Bitcoin's proof-of-work is more than a monetary mechanism. It is a computational operation whose integrity guarantee derives from the physical irreversibility of energy expenditure — not from institutional authority, and not from mathematical hardness assumptions alone.
When a software artifact's cryptographic hash is anchored to the Bitcoin blockchain, the anchor's validity is guaranteed by the cumulative energy expenditure of every subsequent block mined on top of it. That guarantee does not depend on Hashstone. It depends on the second law of thermodynamics.
The verification engine is open-source. The protocol is open. The anchoring service writes a 32-byte Merkle root into a Bitcoin transaction via OP_RETURN. The Bitcoin network does the rest.